Willi Tokarev

Willi Tokarev (11 November 1934-4 August 2019) was a Russian-American singer-songwriter. Born in Chernyshov, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union in 1934 to a family of Cossacks, and he became a live singer in Murmansk in 1970. In 1974, he emigrated to the United States and became a taxi driver in New York City, utlimately resuming his musical career and becoming famous among the Russian emigrant community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. During the late 1980s, he began to travel back to the USSR, and he permanently returned to Russia in 1996. In early 2017, in honor of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States, Tokarev performed a brief new song, "Trumplissimo America!" in Moscow, which declared that "Trump is Superman" and "symbol of America". He died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 84.